Fire Raged, They Played On, and the Photo Still Beguiles

In Robert Van Fleet's well-known photograph, spectators in Massachusetts divided their attention as the Mount Hermon football team hosted Deerfield Academy while a fire burned in a Mount Hermon science building on Nov. 20, 1965.

Robert S. Van Fleet / Associated Press

By SARAH LYALL

May 5, 2015

GILL, Mass. — The photograph, nearly 50 years old, is a social media favorite, a perennial entry on top-10 lists of strange-but-true sports images. And it is certainly strange. Fans watch a football game from the stands as a building burns behind them, failing to look even mildly alarmed at the flames shooting out and the black smoke billowing into the sky.

Even at the time, when the photograph was reprinted around the world, people thought it was too weird to be real. “My colleagues maintain it is a real picture, but I believe it is of the April fool type,” wrote Phil F. Brogan, an editor at The Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Ore. (“I can assure you that the picture was not faked,” replied Arthur H. Kiendl Jr., the headmaster of Mount Hermon, the Massachusetts prep school where the game took place.)

In fact, the photograph, of the Mount Hermon game against Deerfield Academy on Nov. 20, 1965, was an instant classic. Though the photographer, Robert Van Fleet, never received much in the way of payment for it, it was named The Associated Press sports photograph of the year. It was featured on the back page of Life magazine. It was reproduced in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the United States, including The New York Times, often accompanied by supposedly amusing captions about Rome burning, the teams’ “red-hot rivalry” and the like.

Abroad, the photograph appeared in England, France, West Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Colombia, Iran, Venezuela, Turkey and Sweden, among other places. Foreign caption writers knew it illustrated something, although they weren’t altogether sure what.

Was it representative of America’s unhealthily slavish devotion to football? Of the players’ admirable single-mindedness amid chaos? Of the spectators’ idiotically misplaced priorities? Of the quaint absence of fire safety protocols in America?

And, especially: What on earth was going on, that a football game would continue uninterrupted while a major fire raged so near?

Slide Show | A Photographic Study in Contrasts As a high school football game raged in the foreground and a building burned in the back, Robert Van Fleet snapped a photograph. Nearly fifty years later, it continues to turn up.

Jessica Hill for The New York Times

The photograph itself has been seen all over the place for years, but usually with no explanation, so little is known about the story behind it. It involves an old prep-school rivalry, a faultily wired science building full of stuffed birds, thousands of potentially firefighter-impeding spectators, a bunch of officials faced with a difficult decision and a school parent who had no idea that he was snapping what would become one of the most striking photographs in the history of high school sports.

In an interview, Steven Webster, who at the time was a Mount Hermon science teacher in charge of a one-truck volunteer fire brigade at the school, put to rest the most pressing question: Why wasn’t the game postponed when the building caught fire?

“They wanted to keep everyone in the stands rather than going over and getting in the way of the fire,” said Webster, 76, a marine biologist who went on to become a founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.

“On the other hand, if you’re not fighting the fire, what else are you going to do? You may as well watch a football game.”

The game was the last one of the football season, played right before Thanksgiving break. The teams had a long and bitter rivalry, as deep in its way as that between Harvard and Yale, or the Yankees and the Red Sox. Mount Hermon was defending a 17-game winning streak.

It seemed as though every ambulatory Mount Hermon and Deerfield student, and a great many alumni, had turned out for the game; estimates of the crowd range from 3,000 to 7,000 (contemporaneous accounts vary widely on this and many other points). The field was wet, and the players were soon covered in mud. Just before halftime, with Mount Hermon trailing, 20-0, the players noticed something alarming: great plumes of smoke wafting out from the school’s imposing old science building, Silliman Hall.

‘Fire, Fire!’

“Somebody said, ‘Fire, fire!’ and the game stopped right then and there,” said Van Fleet’s son James, who at the time was 17 years old and a player for Mount Hermon (he is somewhere on the left in the photo, he said, crouching down, wearing the No. 64 jersey).

A letter Robert Van Fleet wrote about his experience watching the fire and taking photographs.

Halftime came. Officials conferred about how to handle the nettlesome situation. In a decision that surely would not be made in today’s safety-conscious, litigious world, they decided it would be better if the teams just carried on.

“We were told to suck it up and play,” Van Fleet recalled.

It was not necessarily what the Mount Hermon team wanted to hear. Among other things, the air had become very hot; now they were not only slipping, but also sweating. “We were extraordinarily deflated,” said the younger Van Fleet, 67, who today runs a business selling saunas, whirlpools and hot tubs in Maine. “All of a sudden our building is burning down. It was not a good game.”

That the photograph was taken at all was attributable to luck, timing and instinct. Robert Van Fleet was not a photographer but the chief of Ottaway News Service, an agency that fed articles to a chain of newspapers. He attended the game not as a professional newsman, but as Jim’s father, and he happened to have a camera with him.

When he saw the first wisps of smoke, Robert Van Fleet related in a letter after the fire, he was troubled by “an immense feeling of helplessness.” But then his news instincts kicked in, and “the rather perverse possibilities of the scene dawned on me,” he said. He took about 20 pictures, timing them to coincide with the beginning or middle of plays on the field so he could capture more people watching the game than watching the fire.

“I had a once-in-a-lifetime shot,” he wrote. He took the photograph with him back to the offices of the local Ottaway newspaper. It was picked up by both The Associated Press and United Press International, and from there it made its way around the world. (Another notable photograph of the year showed Cassius Clay, as Muhammad Ali was then called, taunting a prone Sonny Liston in their world championship heavyweight fight in Lewiston, Me.)

Robert Van Fleet died in 1997, but the picture continues to turn up. For a while, ESPN featured it on the walls of its franchised sports bars. Occasionally you see it offered for sale online. Sometimes it appears without attribution (or with the wrong attribution), a state of affairs that continually incenses Van Fleet’s widow, Celeste, who has a scrapbook at her home in Middletown, N.Y., devoted to the photograph and the correspondence around it.

The photograph was slightly misleading, in that the science building was in reality a field’s distance away from the spectators’ stands, maybe 80 to 100 yards, rather than right behind it. But still.

A photograph Van Fleet took of his son James, left, who was a co-captain of the football team at Mount Hermon, in front of the science building a year before the fire.

Even as Van Fleet was taking the photographs, students, alumni and workers from numerous fire departments struggled to put out the fire, which had apparently begun under the roof and was thought to be a result of faulty wiring (some suspected arson, but it was never proved). Volunteers formed a bucket brigade to remove items — lab equipment, chemicals, caged mice — from the building, but could not save everything. The building burned down. Among the lost or ruined items were hundreds of rare stuffed birds, which ended up too charred or water damaged to be of use.

The Teams Keep Playing

On the field, Mount Hermon rallied in the second half, narrowing the score to 20-14. Going into the final moments, it had possession of the ball and it seemed victory was in reach. But, according to Jim Smith, the Deerfield football coach, Deerfield responded with a fancy defensive play involving a flashy player named Bill Coghill.

“He played defensive tackle, but I moved him up to linebacker,” Smith recalled of Coghill, who went on to play at Syracuse, serve in Vietnam and play professional football in Canada.

That was that. Mount Hermon lost not only the science building, but also the game, 20-14.

Smith, who was Deerfield’s coach for 36 years and is now 86 and retired, has a different perspective on the whole thing. Forget the fire, really.

“It was one of the most memorable games of my career,” he said. “It was so exciting that nobody wanted to stop the game, and that was the No. 1 thing in my mind.”

Many things have changed since that day. Mount Hermon merged with its sister school, Northfield, went coed, and is now known as Northfield Mount Hermon. Last year, the school eliminated its football program, having found it difficult to field a competitive team amid worries about head injuries.

The newspapers that used Van Fleet's photograph of the burning building included, clockwise from top left, The London Observer, The New York Times, The Daily News and The Boston Globe.

In the scheme of things, said the school’s archivist, Peter Weis, the fire is probably only the second-most exciting thing to happen in Mount Hermon history, behind the 1934 murder of the headmaster. (Suspicion fell on the dean, allegedly his enemy, but nothing was ever proved.)

Still, there is perennial interest in the famous photograph, which this fall will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Weis, whose father taught at Mount Hermon and who himself briefly attended the infamous game — he does not remember much, having been 6 at the time — keeps neat folders full of clippings about the fire in his offices in the Northfield Mount Hermon library here. He said the decision not to postpone the game reflected the values of “a simpler time.”

“There was less second-guessing and worrying about, ‘Did we do the right thing?’ ” he said. “Nobody got hurt. We have files of notes that went flying around from headmasters of other schools offering us scientific apparatus and things like that. In terms of wondering whether continuing to play the game was a good idea, there was none of that.”

He could not say with certainty why the photograph had proved so exciting to so many people over the years, but said it most likely had to do with the odd notion of a game going on no matter what else was happening.

As a commenter said, sarcastically, in a discussion thread about the photograph that appeared on a website recently, “Every day a building burns on campus, but I’ll be damned if I miss this few and far between football game!”

“The question of ‘Why would you keep playing?’ gets asked,” Weis said. “But the question I would ask is, ‘Why would you stop?’ ”

Correction: May 5, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the uniform number worn by Robert Van Fleet’s son, James. It was 64, not 47.